Every saint is a facet of the Diamond who is God. And every saint who has founded a religious congregation has given that facet to his or her followers. We call that facet a charism, meaning a gift to the world. A charism is the way a particular person or

An angel is pure intelligence, but we limited intelligences try to cramp an angel into a semi-material being with wings. The part of me closest to angelic is my spirit, my mind. We humans are evolving into a new dimension when our spirits will become more “who we are” than

When I get an idea, I tend to tell myself like the nursery rhyme character holding up a plum, “Oh, what a good girl am I!” Then I check myself: Wait a minute. Those good ideas come from God. God put that good idea into my head. God put that

In her book Dakota Kathleen Norris describes an antelope whose neck is “like a message in unbreakable code.” Autumn night skies also possess a message in unbreakable code. In pre-dawn I walk across the road toward the mailbox, my head tilted back, my feet knowing the way by memory. The

A curved line on the edge of the lake attracted my attention. It was the neck of a heron. The bird stood stock-still, a dark line painted against the water. Its livelihood depended upon silence, but was its heart pounding in its ears with stirring hope for a tasty fish?

September 15 is traditionally the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows in the Catholic liturgical calendar. Sunday takes precedence this year, but I got to musing about Mary remembered under this title while praying for our three Sisters who take this feast of Mary as their name day. The other

My youngest sister and I are the same age, although she was born five years after me. You and I are the same age, too, even though I don’t know who’s reading this blog. We both began at the Big Bang, or the Grand Radiance, or whatever you wish to

When we hear that someone has cancer, the news is a call to faith. A neighbor has cancer, and three of us sisters visited him. With his children and grandchildren present, we talked about our founding sister, Sister Maria Aloysia. Then we prayed for a complete cure through her intercession.

I got up, unlocked LialRenewalCenter, prayed Morning Prayer and meditation, helped prepare three meals for 27 retreatants, prepared liturgies for St. Richard Church, played a card game with the sisters with whom I live after praying Evening Prayer with them, phoned and wrote e-mails, and went to bed. Although the

Sometimes best-sellers portray unusual, even unnerving pictures of God. Could Shay Bourne in Jodi Piccoult’s Change of Heart be Jesus? Is the Holy Spirit Saraya, Keeper of the gardens, in William Young’s The Shack? Does the main character in the Joshua books depict Jesus? Even the gospels give us four